December 2018

November 12, 2010

A refined Kennedy assassination diagram

At the JFK Assassination Forum online, Joe Elliott linked to my Single Bullet Fact sketch to illustrate that, back in Dallas in 1963, one bullet easily could have passed through President Kennedy’s neck and also wounded Gov. John Connally.

You say, “Below is a good Pro SBT [Single Bullet Theory] diagram:” and then you link to the Free Frank cartoon which shows the bullet going through Connally’s THUMB and then his hat.

Are you really so stupid that you think the bullet went through Connally’s THUMB? Show me the hole in his hat.

Plus he has the bullet hitting Connally’s back about halfway to his right armpit whereas the bullet actually hit his right armpit.

Then his bullet exits almost on Connally’s midline whereas his exit wound was about halfway over from the midline just below the nipple. Maybe you’re some freak of nature, but just take off your shirt and check to see if your right nipple is where his line exits.

To sum up Marsh’s points: My “cartoon” is fatally flawed. Elliott is stupid and could be a freak.

Testing the angle. Let me explain a little about my sketch. It wasn’t prepared for a court of law. I started with the bullet angle, as determined by several other studies. It represents the last few feet of the 189-foot trajectory from Lee Harvey Oswald’s sixth-floor perch at the Texas School Book Depository to Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental limousine on Elm Street, Dealey Plaza, at 12:30 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963. I simply was testing whether a single 6.5 millimeter rifle bullet, in that straight line and at that angle, could hit Kennedy’s neck, Connally’s back, Connally’s right hand and Connally’s left thigh.

Generally, the test proved a single bullet could hit all those points.

But Anthony Marsh saw something else in my sketch. He saw the bullet NOT entering close enough to Kennedy’s right arm pit, NOT exiting below Kennedy’s right nipple, and NOT scoring a direct hit on Connally’s right wrist. Fair enough. But it’s remarkable that Marsh couldn’t look at that sketch and imagine for a moment that, if Connally’s position were only slightly altered (well within the Zapruder film margin of error), the bullet would hit all those points precisely. After all, I did point out that Connally’s knees probably were angled more to the right. (Why? Because he would want to be in a position to turn around easily to chat with Kennedy.)

I said:

[I]f Connally shifted his knees a little to the right, which he probably did, his left thigh wound is even easier to understand.

Hat without holes. Then there’s the hat. Because I drew it where I did, Anthony Marsh demanded to see a hat bullet hole. Fine, I showed Connally’s hat in the wrong place. We can’t see that Stetson in the Zapruder film until Connally pulls it over, flashing it immediately after he’s hit. So, as Marsh knows, we don’t know exactly how Connally was holding it, and there’s just as good a chance he was holding it over his left arm as in his lap. It was a big hat, after all. (It also would be interesting to see what, if anything, Connally told the Warren Commission about how he was holding that hat.)

NEW, IMPROVED DIAGRAM. So let’s take another look. I sketched this today. It's not a great leap from the original sketch:

Shift Connally’s knees to the right. With that exact same bullet angle, here (above) is a sketch that meets all of Marsh’s touch points. The single bullet lines up well.

Hi Frank. My line is the actual trajectory of the wounds through Connally. The 23.5 degrees is the angle measured by Doctor Shaw of Connally's wounds relative to his midline. Myers knows this, which is why he has to invent a large deflection in Connally, a deflection that all of the doctors who have ever looked at the case in an official capacity said did not happen.

I think that figure is in the Warren report, certainly in the HSCA. Myers accepts it, and he's meant to be the leading authority on the SBT. He also says Connally was turned 37.5 degrees to his right ( no i don't know how he is able to be so accurate either)

Despite Myers numoerous TV appearences hawking his cartoon, he only mentions in a brief para tucked away on his website that his entire simulation is built on a huge deflection inside Connally, one he even admits he has no evidence for.

Franks method appears to be to simply arrange the two men so they fit the desired trajectory, rather then finding out where the wounds actually were on the men then seeing if they fit the trajectory.

As I said, originally I drew the diagram to determine whether the single bullet generally could produce all those non-fatal wounds.

Now, considering the doctors' descriptions of the wounds (near the right arm pit, under the right nipple), I've readjusted the diagram.

One obvious problem with measuring a bullet angle is that it usually is done after doctors have cut the patient to look for internal injuries or bullet fragments.

The 21.3-degree angle is possible, but it is interesting what you learn from working on a diagram:

If the angle were that shallow, then either Connally's legs were turned farther to the right (where the bullet would hit the left thigh), or the slowed bullet deflected (or deflected again) off the large bone in Connally's wrist.

Again, I'd also like to see any of Connally's comments on where and how he was holding that cowboy hat.

You'll see his hand is right next to his right nipple. Note Connally's unpained expression, which is one of the reason he believed he hadn't been hit yet.

Also if you read Doctor Gregory's testimony, you'll see he believed the wrist wound was actually made by an irregular bullet fragment rather than a whole bullet. He speculated that the wrist was injured by one of the fragments of lead that rained on the car when the head shot fragmented at 313. He has a point I think.

Reading the WC evidence is very instructive, as it bears no relation to their conclusions. Did you know, for instance, that a panel fo doctors, ballistics experts and commision staff viewed high quality first generation slides of the Zapruder film and concluded that Kennedy was probably showing a reaction to a shot before he went behind the sign? Which also was the conclusion of the HSCA 14 years later. And if you view high quality frames, Kennedys reaction to getting shot is unmissable at 202-207. This ties in perfectly with Phil Willis, who took a picture at Zapruder frame 202 as a reflex action to hearing the first shot.

ok, that makes sence about the single bullet, but what about the second shot? his head went back and to the left. there was obviously someone else. if oswald shot him in the head, his skull would've pitched forward thus excluding a reason for jackie kennedy to reach towards the back of the lincoln to grab skull fragments. yo uguys need to watch jfk one more time, mainly the ending.

The shooting has been replicated several times in several ways, and the re-enactments show the blood droplets and pieces of brain and skull would fly just as they did, if Kennedy were shot from behind.

Set aside the "JFK" fiction. Watch the Zapruder film and judge honestly for yourself. When Kennedy's head is hit, it seems he is hit from behind. His head goes forward in the first instant. His secondary backward movement is from reflex and then, probably, from a deathly loss of muscle control as the car moves on.

Those skull fragments seem to fly backward because the forward-moving car is creating an airstream that catches whatever flies.

Frank, I agree with you most times, but the diagrams are wrong. The single bullet didn't enter through the neck and even WC member Gerald Ford years later admitted to positioning the wound higher. According to the FBI report signed by agents Sibert and O'Neill, "Doctor Humes located an opening which appeared to be a bullet hole which was below the shoulders and two inches to the right of the middle line of the spinal column." The original autopsy sheet as verified by JFK's personal physician Dr. George Burkley also showed the wound at a lower position. If there were both a back and a neck wound we now have four impossible to make shots(including the missed shot and fatal head wound). If not, then the strange trajectory of the back wound is very hard for me to believe.

But I have to wonder how much precision the doctors initially put into their measurements of the wounds to Kennedy and Connally. Their first task was to see if they could save a life or two. Each surgical cut altered the wounds. They weren't worried immediately about measurements or exact descriptions. And they never could have imagined the conspiracy theories even the smallest error would spawn.

Just the description of the neck wound can cause all sorts of confusion. The fact is, a bullet that comes out the lower part of your neck at the angle we've been examining would have to enter the upper back, or the spot where the back of the neck reaches the upper back. Usually, we think of the neck on one side, the neck on the other side. The description could have been muddled when someone wrote it down. Referring to the back of the neck or the upper shoulder or the upper back says different things to different people.

I have the feeling that, if you got most Kennedy assassination experts in one room together and examined the documentation on this, we'd find their differences were rather minor. But I could be wrong.

I just got around to rechecking your website. You have made some improvements to the diagram. Of course, it's impossible to precisely measure the positions of JFK and Connally at z221-z224, so I won't be surprised if you come up with more revisions. And you will always have critics. But the critics will never explain, if your diagram is wrong, why they don't make a diagram for z223 showing the correction positions of JFK and Connally and the correct trajectory from the sniper's nest. Nor will they explain what happened to the bullet that passed through JFK but did not hit Connally, nor any of the passengers, nor any part of the limousine. Did that bullet evaporate out of existence after passing through JFK?